Planning theory and women's role in the city

Abstract

Feminist historians have expended a good deal of energy on delineating the cultural concept of the Two Spheres This curious cultural phenomenon emerged in the wake of the evangelical revival and the Industrial Revolution, and caused people to believe that the world was divided into two to match the two sexes. The male part was the world of public affairs, commerce, business and, of course, the defence of the realm. The female centred on the private domain: home, family and children. The problem that this imposed on women has never yet been successfully resolved: the sexual division of labour and the domestic location of women's work. In Britain in the nineteenth century, as the population moved into the cities and standards of living rose (if patchily), the physical form of the modern urban environment took shape in ways which perpetuated the continuance of the Two Spheres. This was particularly true for middle-class women, whose lives in suburban retreats had little physical connection with the rest of the city. Of all the pressures which dictated the form of nineteenth-century cities, there was not one related to finding new ways for women to live in modern cities outside a rigid interpretation of the Two Spheres.